Case study

Appsmith Billing

Designing billing across cloud, self-hosted, licences, and recovery

Appsmith ↗

Choose your depth

The problem, my contribution, outcomes, and strongest screens.

My role

Product design · Experience strategy · Systems modelling

Product focus

A cross-product billing and licensing system spanning usage, pricing, purchase, access, failure, and recovery.

Overview

I led the experience strategy for Appsmith’s billing and licensing journey across the customer portal and self-hosted product. The system connects usage, pricing, plan selection, licence setup, payment health, and recovery without making customers learn a different model at every handoff.

The problem

Billing crossed cloud and self-hosted products, usage-based pricing, Community, Business, and Enterprise plans, trials, licence keys, payment failures, and downgrades. The challenge was to make those relationships understandable while keeping routine actions direct and consequential actions explicit.

What I drove

Mapped how plan, licence origin, usage, account role, payment status, and lifecycle stage affect the next available action.
Turned scattered business rules and edge cases into a shared decision model for product and engineering.
Designed connected journeys for evaluation, upgrade, installation, licence management, payment recovery, and downgrade.

What changed

Created one shared model for usage, plan, licence, payment, role, and lifecycle states.
Gave product and engineering explicit behaviour for high-risk billing moments across cloud and self-hosted products.

Impact

What the work was designed to move

Business impact

Unified usage, billing, and licensing rules reduced cross-team ambiguity across the customer portal and self-hosted product.

Customer impact

Customers can see what a plan costs, what it unlocks, and what changes before they upgrade, recover a payment, or downgrade.

Revenue impact

Supports trial conversion, upgrades, and payment recovery through clearer next steps at each revenue-critical moment.

Highlights evidence

3 essential screens from the final experience.

Appsmith Billing: Explained usage-based pricing beside the plan benefits it unlocks — Explained usage-based pricing beside the plan benefits it unlocks

Appsmith Billing: Kept trial status, licence validity, and self-hosted setup in one operational view — Kept trial status, licence validity, and self-hosted setup in one operational view

Appsmith Billing: Turned a failed payment into a time-bound recovery path instead of a generic warning — Turned a failed payment into a time-bound recovery path instead of a generic warning